New Background Info ‘TrackBack’ format

Wednesday 14th January 2004

Those of you who have explored the Background Info section will have found the lists of ‘TrackBack’ links for each item; kind of an index that lists when each item has been mentioned in the diary. (See also this for how the lists are generated, and this for an attempt at explaining TrackBack.)

However, it has never been ideal: links were often duplicated; links to diary entries were often in the wrong order; on some pages the list of links was getting unwieldy; and not all relevant diary entries were linked to.

The first problem was due to strangeness with the software that I won’t go into here. While I haven’t fixed the cause, I have written some tools that make it easy to tidy things up so duplicate links shouldn’t be a problem now.

I’ve also changed the format of the links and worked out a way to keep them in order. See, for example, the list for Sir John Lawson or the longer one for Elizabeth Pepys. Hopefully those are a bit easier to take in at a glance (here’s what Elizabeth’s used to look like). The formatting goes a little askew on heavily-linked items, like Sandwich, but I think it’s still an improvement.

That only leaves the problem of missing references to the diary. Early last year I didn’t create as many links as I do now, so many eary references don’t appear. Now I’ve fixed these other problems it’ll be more worthwhile me going back and adding these in (when I have time).

As ever, do let me know if something doesn’t look right for you, or you have any suggestions for further improvements.

(UPDATE: I wrote a little bit more about the technical side here, if you’re interested.)